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Alicia Suskin
Ostriker
USA
ostriker@amenti.rutgers.edu
Alicia Ostriker is the author of nine volumes of
poetry, including The Imaginary Lover , which won the 1986 William
Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America, and The
Crack in Everything (1996), which was a National Book Award finalist
and won both the Paterson Poetry Prize and the San Francisco State
Poetry Center Award. The Little Space: Poems Selected and New,
1968-1998, was a National Book Award finalist and a finalist for the
Lenore Marshall Award of the Academy of American Poets. A new volume,
The Volcano Sequence, is due in February 2002.
Ostriker's poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review,
Antaeus, The Nation,
POETRY, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, The Atlantic, MS,
Tikkun, and many other journals, and have been widely anthologized.
Her poetry and essays have been translated into French, German,
Italian, Chinese, Japanese, Hebrew and Arabic.
Ostrikers critical works include Writing Like a Woman (1982), Stealing
the Language: the Emergence of Womens Poetry in America (1986), and
Feminist Revision and the Bible (1992). The Nakedness of the Fathers:
Biblical Visions and Revisions (1994) is a combination of poetry and
prose meditations on the bible from a contemporary Jewish womans point
of view. Most recently, she has published Dancing at the Devils Party:
Essays on Poetry, Politics and the Erotic (2000). Ostriker has
received awards from the National Endowment
for the Arts, the New Jersey Arts Council, the Rockefeller Foundation,
and the Guggenheim Foundation. Her work has been in the Pushcart Prize
Anthology, the Yearbook of American Poetry, and the Best Poems of 1997
edited by Adrienne Rich. She lives in Princeton, NJ and teaches
English and Creative Writing at Rutgers University. In Spring 2002 she
will be Distinguished Visiting Professor of English and Women's Studies
at
Brandeis University.
COMMENTS ON THE VOLCANO SEQUENCE
Ostriker is our morning-after psalmist; our wild, justice-starved,
embodied, dazzling intelligence in its unending argument with itself,
the world, and God. And she is our latter-day Ariadne: hers the "red
thread" of the living blood line--entrails, tradition, umbilicus--what
tethers us to all our sources--pulsing, torn and essential connection.
--Eleanor Wilner
"The Volcano Sequence" is one of those poems the world of literature
occasionally has the good fortune to receive which doesn't so much sum
up a life, as embody it....This is a poem with a voice of its own; it
is a prayer to God and a hymn of accusation for the lapses of
divinity; it is a psalm of praise for the life of the flesh, and a
mourning for life's fleetingness.
--C.K. Williams
COMMENTS ON OTHER POEMS:
"One of the most intelligent and lyric of American poets."
--Valerie Trueblood, Iowa Review
"All of us who are women poets, idol breakers and revisionists. . .
feel a deep kinship to the work of Alicia Ostriker, and a debt as
well."
--Eleanor Wilner
"Ostriker writes poems born of tragedy and illness...poems of sheer
joy...fresh, brave,
unself-pitying...one of our finest poets."
--Hudson Review
"Stunning, unforgettable poems."
--San Francisco Chronicle
"Now that Ginsberg is gone, Ostriker is contemporary poetry's most
Blakean figure."
--Women's Review of Books
"Alicia Ostriker has become one of those brilliantly provocative and
imaginatively gifted contemporaries whose iconoclastic expression,
whether in prose or poetry, is essential to
our understanding of our American selves." --Joyce Carol Oates |
bright sunshine
bright sunshine, wind, life
flaring up in the street
dirt exhales grass
treetops wave foliage ruffles
like dancers then
shady lower boughs lift
the maples appear to be waltzing
at the chlorophyll ball
then mother when I call you say
you tried going out
even with a coat
there was too much wind
too much
wind
the day after
you remind me you were a wild one
you used to beat up the boys on your block
you were teacher's pet, you won prizes for poetry
you had beautiful eyes
you tell your neighbor I am your moon and stars
you are upset the plumber stole your purse
so I drive over and find it
on the counter among the flies
our mothers: a correspondence
--for Toi Derricotte
I send you my whitehaired poems
you reply: "our small box of words"
if we were men we would call it a word-hoard
like the warriors and bards in Beowulf
if we were real men
we would strut not cringe
over our language
what would we do
if we were real women
feed the hunger
chew everything
use up the words in the box
before we die
leave nothing to rot
"mother" you coldly remark
as if with curled lip "some women
walk away over the ice"
leave their old mothers
to the wolves
in times of poor fishing
or when we cannot
bear them on our backs
any further
the wolves pace
just outside the perimeter of firelight
we can hear them pant
we know the muscled grace
of their grey bodies all night in motion
all poetry is, you say,
"an attempt
to name the disappearance
that got in the way"
and I rise from my chair thinking yes,
its the goddess, lets face it--
when they chopped her groves down
nailed her shrines shut
forgot the words to her songs
when she stalked back to myth
we lost something worth having
the men did it but the women
co-operated as usual
then there were ages
when stones dropped from walls
cities disappeared from the light of heaven
scattered buried
some statues remained
some painted figurines, some clay icons
snakes writhe in their fists
behind museum glass
we need to blame someone
we scream at our mothers
"where is she? what have you
done with her?"
the shekhinah as mute
our mothers tremble vibrate
hesitate at the edge of speech
as at an unmade bed, their mouths work, confused
our mothers helpless to tell us
"She whom you seek sacrificed
her place before the throne
dived into the atomic structure
of matter and hides there
hair wings streaming
womb compassionate pitiless
eyes seeing to the ends of the universe
in which life struggles and delights in life"
they cannot take our hands show us
how to take comfort in raisins and apples
break apart laughing spit seed
they cannot say "seek me"
they teach us cooking clothing craftiness
they tell us their own stories of power and shame
and even if it is she who speaks through their mouths
and has crawled through ten thousand wombs until this day
we cannot listen
their words fall like spilled face powder
Credit: THE VOLCANO SEQUENCE,
Univ. of Pittsburgh press, 2002.
© All Copyright, Alicia Ostriker.
All Rights Reserved. Printed By
Permission.
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